by Peter Handke
Mulberry Lane
I spent another few days in Provence. Occasionally, on top of much else, I lost my sense of humor, and my colors faded; pallid formlessness (always when walking downhill). One night a man crossed over to me from the other side of the street and said: “I’m going to kill you.” I looked at his hands, which were empty. “No, not with a knife.” I managed to catch his eye, and we went a short way together—false friends.
In Cézanne’s studio on the Chemin des Lauves, his belongings had become relics. Beside the shriveled fruit on the windowsill, my grandfather’s thick black jacket had been carefully hung. In the café on the Cours Mirabeau, I saw The Card Players; they had spread a square of baize on the table and were different from what they were in the pictures—and yet exactly the same (their eyes glued to their cards). I sat near them, reading Balzac’s story “The Unknown Masterpiece,” about Frenhofer, the unsuccessful painter, with whose longing for a perfect and therefore real picture Cézanne identified himself, and discovered that French culture had become the home I had always longed for. The Jas de Bouffan (House of the Wind), the family’s old country home, where the painter had worked and which he often painted, now borders on the superhighway to Marseilles; a housing development behind it has taken its name. “Réussir votre isolation” says a billboard advertisement for a home-insulation firm. But a little later I misread the “Omniprix” on a supermarket sign as the “Omnipotens” that occurs in one of Cézanne’s letters.
Once I got lost out in the macchia and suddenly found myself looking down on a man-made lake which lay far below me, as blue and deserted as a northern fjord; over its turbulent waves flew a flock of withered leaves. A gust of wind struck a tree like a bomb, and a maquis bush glistened as though swarming with ants. Nevertheless, time and again, I felt the embrace of beauty so intensely that I, in turn, longed to embrace someone.
On the last day, I finally made up my mind to climb the mountain, which until then I had only circled. My starting point was Vauvenargues, a village in the northern syncline of the mountain ridge, where the philosopher by that name made the observation: “It was the passions that first taught man reason.”
The climb to the crest, where the abandoned chapel is situated, was long but not difficult. (I put some apples in my pockets to ward off thirst.) A strong wind was blowing at the top; I sat in the cleft which from below I had looked upon as the “ideal pass”; far to the south I saw the Mediterranean, to the north the gray flank of Mont Ventoux, and to the northeast, far in the distance, the snowfields of the northern Alps: they were “really pure white” (as someone once said of white hyacinths). The former Garden of the Monks was nestled deep in the rock like a dolina, a shelter from the wind; high above it, a whirring of swallows’ wings (which recurred indistinctly on my way back, accompanied by a swaying of spiderwebs). Higher up, on the crest, hardly distinct from the rock of the mountain, a tiny stone military hut, manned by two soldiers, who had to stoop to go in and out, and equipped with a radio telephone, which could be heard crackling a long way off.
But it was something more than this military installation or the limestone, which looked dull gray as one came closer, which made the mountaintop so unreal. There was no summit feeling; and my thoughts turned to a famous mountain climber who, in describing his ecstasy at the highest point on earth, drew on the observations that another man (not a mountain climber) had jotted down while strolling through almost level suburban streets, barely a hundred meters above sea level. Consequently, I didn’t stay long but started on the westward descent, taking pleasure in the upland meadows, the valleys, and the Provençal roads, which Cézanne had praised for being Roman roads. “The roads of the Romans are always admirably placed. They had a feeling for landscape. At every point, there’s a picture.” (One more reason for walking on traveled roads rather than cross-country trails.)
When I looked around at the mountain from the first plateau, its flanks had again taken on a festive radiance (one spot glowed like a vein of marble); and when I next looked back, from deep in a pine forest down below, its brightness shone through the treetops as though a wedding dress had been hanging there. As I went on, I threw an apple and it curved through the air, connecting my path with the forest and the rocks.
It is that expedition which gave me my justification for writing a “Lesson of Mont Saint-Victoire.”
In the great painter’s territory I had grown more invisible from day to day—to others as well as to myself; the strangers around me helped by amiably overlooking me. After a while I could choose, or so it seemed, to be “the invisible man” whenever I pleased. I felt, not that I had vanished or dissolved into the landscape, but that I was well hidden among its objects (Cézanne’s objects).
But hadn’t this always been the case; wasn’t there even in my childhood something which, like L’Estaque later on, was for me the place, the thing of concealment? Cézanne has nothing to do with this thing (but another painter does, no doubt). It took on meaning for me through the legend of a saint (in which it is not even mentioned).
The thing is a woodpile; the legend is the story of St. Alexius under the stairs; and the other painter is Piros-mani, a Georgian peasant painter who died penniless under the last of the Tsars and is now famous. There is a connection, which cannot be explained but can be told.
In my grandparents’ house there was a wooden stairway, and under it a windowless room. In that room “under the stairs” (so I believed at the time) St. Alexius, returned unrecognized from foreign parts, lay reveling in the thrills of concealment (which were my own). Later I saw similar stairways in other houses, with storerooms for tools or neatly piled firewood under them. Much later I daydreamed that my ancestors, about whom I knew next to nothing, came from Georgia; and just as I had found in Cape Cod the house for the man in the story that was still to be written, I hoped that in the East I would learn something of his origin—in this, my point of departure was Pirosmani’s pictures, which kept pace with his own life. The Georgian painter had moved about the country a good deal, earning a livelihood chiefly by painting the signboards of inns, and had spent the last years of his life unrecognized, in a woodshed, which in my fancy was “under the stairs” … And (closing the circle?) I as a writer longed at one time to become with my writing a corduroy road for someone else (who could, however, be myself), or, precisely, a light-colored, tightly packed woodpile.
The justification for writing—needed for every new work—made its appearance on that descent from Mont Sainte-Victoire, when I succeeded for once in criticizing myself (instead of sinking into myself and losing my sense of humor as usual when walking downhill). At the sight of a shimmering meadow, which instantly made me think: Garden of Eden, and where even the molehills appeared to me at first as “in the blue distance,” I took myself to task: “Why at the sight of beauty must you draw celestial comparisons? Look at the earth, speak of the earth, or just of this spot here. Name it with its colors.”
I deliberately slackened my pace and bowed my head, to avoid looking into the distance. In the dusk, I looked into a side path, but only out of the corner of my eye. At present, I don’t remember whether I stood still. Most likely I went on without stopping, but in a state of joyful calm; once again imbued with my justification for writing, once again a self-confident scribe and storyteller.
Why do I say justification? Because there I experienced the moment of unspecified love without which there can be no justified writing. Far down the side path I saw a mulberry tree (what I actually saw was reddish spots of juice in the light-colored dust of the path), in fresh, radiant conjunction with the juice-red of the mulberries of the summer of 1971 in Yugoslavia, where for the first time I had managed to conceive of true joy; and something—the thing seen? my vision?—darkened; at the same time, every detail appeared round and clear; and all this in the midst of silence in which my usual self became strictly No One, and I, in a sudden transformation, became something more than merely invisible, namely, a w
riter.
Yes, this twilit side path now belonged to me and became namable. In addition to innocently uniting the fragments of my own life with the mulberry spots on the dust, the moment of fantasy (in which I alone am real to myself and know the truth) revealed to me anew my kinship with other, unknown lives, thus acting as an unspecified love and striving to communicate itself in a form conducive to fidelity, namely, as a justified project aimed at the cohesion of my never-to-be-defined nation as our common form of existence: this was a moment that relieved me and cheered me, the daring moment of my calling as a writer, and in it I became as serene as when thinking “the idea of a ship.” But then the usual torment (which, however, is the opposite of despair) returned: “But what is form? What has the innocent man I am here (I do not feel myself to be good, only innocent) to tell? And who is the hero of such a story?” (For, unspecified reader, who but the subject of a picture or the hero of a story ever proposed anything to you in your life?)
A car stopped (there was a quiet little dog in the back seat) and gave me a lift to Aix, where I arrived with a passionate resolve; in pursuit of a dematerialized but substantial language, with which I hoped to tell of the long overdue return of the man with the folded arms. No, it was not a torment; it was work.
The Picture of Pictures
Thus far, I have been speaking of a painter and a writer; of pictures and writing. But now it is time to tell how I came to see the painter Paul Cézanne as a teacher of mankind—I do not fear to say: the teacher of mankind in the here and now.
Stifter formulated the eternal law of art, as follows: “The blowing of the wind the murmur of the stream the growing of the grain the rolling of the sea the greening of the earth the glowing of the sky the light of the stars—these things I regard as great … Let us try to find the gentle law by which the human race is governed.” Yet one is struck by the fact that Stifter’s stories almost consistently end in catastrophe; indeed, the situation in itself, without dramatic accent, becomes a menace. At first, the snow falls “peacefully, tranquilly”; it is a “lovely white cloak”; then, to the children, when they venture up to the at first “beautiful,” then “terrifyingly blue” glacier, it becomes a “white darkness”; for weeks the “radiant sky” over the village remains a radiant sky, but in the end it transforms the “soft blue air” into a “sheer cliff.” Explanations for this transposition of things into the realm of the sinister have been sought and found in the person of the writer. But the time element in the narrative is also responsible for providing the gently murmuring stream with those dangerous pits—into which, moreover, no one sinks for good, so that the opening sentence of Limestone applies to all the other tales: “I am going to tell a story a friend once told me, in which nothing unusual happens, but which I have nevertheless been unable to forget.” (Stifter, who was also a painter, never depicted a catastrophe in his paintings; at worst, they show trees felled by the wind.) At the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris, there is a Cézanne painting whose meaning—not only to him, the painter, and not only to me, a writer—I thought I understood.
It was painted in the last years of his life, after the turn of the century. Like many of his earlier pictures, it depicts rocks and pine trees. The site is named in the title: Rocks Near the Grottoes Above the Château Noir. (The Château Noir is an old manor house above the village of Le Tholonet.)
It is hard to say exactly what I understood. My strongest feeling at the time was one of “nearness.” Today, in my need to communicate my experience after long “reflection on things seen” (it would be more accurate to speak of a brainstorm), a scene in a film comes to mind: Henry Fonda dancing with his mother in The Grapes of Wrath.
All those present are dancing to ward off a grave menace: driven from place to place by landlessness, they are defending the bit of soil on which they have finally found a home and refuge, from the enemies all around them. Although the dancing is purely a stratagem (while whirling each other about, mother, son, and all the rest exchange wily, vigilant looks), it is nevertheless a dance like other dances (and as none before it), a dance of warmth and solidarity.
Danger, dance, solidarity, warmth—these were the components of my feeling of “nearness” as I stood looking at the painting. Suddenly magnified, the pines and rocks were deep within me—just as a flushing bird momentarily flies through one’s body with giant wings; but instead of passing as such phantasms of horror do, they remained. Yes, my feeling of nearness was an insight. In the year 1904, when this picture was painted, something irrevocable happened, a cosmic event; and the cosmic event was this picture.
Once, when Cézanne was asked to explain what he meant by a motif, he slowly joined the outspread fingers of his two hands together, folded, and interlocked them. Reading about this, I remembered that in looking at this picture I had seen the pines and rocks as intertwined letters, their meaning as clear as it was indefinable. In one of Cézanne’s letters I read that he did not paint “from nature”—that his pictures were “constructions and harmonies parallel to nature.” Then, taught by the canvas itself, I realized that in that historical moment the pines and rocks, on a plain surface but—irreversibly dispelling the spatial illusion!—in colors and forms bound to the actual spot (“above the Chateau Noir”), had joined hands to form a coherent picture writing unique in the history of mankind.
Thing-image-script in one: that is the miracle—and yet it does not fully communicate my feeling of nearness. Here I must also mention the house plant which, looking through a window, I saw against the landscape as a Chinese character. Cézanne’s rocks and trees were more than such characters; more than pure forms without earthly traces—in addition, they were woven into incantations by the painter’s dramatic brushstroke. At first my only thought was: So near. Now they seem to me related to the first cave paintings. They were things, they were images, they were script; they were brushstrokes—and all these were in harmony.
In a few hundred years, the painter had written from L’Estaque, the whole world would be flattened. He had added: “But the little that remains is still very dear to the heart and eye.” And thirty years later, he said: “Things are in a bad way. We shall have to hurry if we want to see anything. Everything is vanishing.”
Has everything really vanished? Didn’t it come to me, in those days at the Jeu de Paume, that Cézanne’s great thing-image-script-brushstroke-dance, that miracle unique in the history of mankind, will open the world to us mortals for all time? Didn’t I recognize those pines and rocks as the picture of pictures, in the presence of which (and of others near it and elsewhere) the “good self” could continue to find new strength? Didn’t I, even then, regard the still lifes on the opposite wall as well cared-for “children”?
The Jeu de Paume is a rather commonplace museum—but this wall radiant with beloved objects is exemplary in its beauty (not to mention the fact that the window opens out on the Place de la Concorde, which to Cézanne’s mind was “the square of squares”). The pears, peaches, apples, and onions, the vases, bowls, and bottles strike one, in part because of the slight distortions and inclined planes, as enchanted things, which in another moment will come to life. And yet it is obviously the instant before the earthquake: as though these things were the last of their kind.
There is a comparable wall in a museum in Switzerland. Three large portraits hang side by side: the painter himself, his wife, and the boy with the red vest. These nameless persons seem to be looking out of the window of a train that is standing still but traveling through the ages. They have been traveling a long time and still have a long way to go. Only the child props his head on one hand and seems tired; the grownups are erect, expressionless, and alert. Their wall now forms an intersection with the still-life wall at the Jeu de Paume: the Zürich train with the three people in it stops at the avenue of fruit in Paris.
Are Cézanne’s works, then, messages? As I see it, they are proposals. (Ludwig Hohl once said that Van Gogh’s visions “could also have been told,�
� whereas Cézanne’s “could only be painted.”) What do they propose to me? Their secret lies in producing the effect of proposals.
For, obviously, almost everything has vanished. In a pile of fruit, the dull yellow of one waxed orange is enough; after that I can imagine nothing more. Where today is the color that comes from the substance of the thing itself? What thing today is food for the eyes? That is why I search so needily for intact nature. Time and again, what I find may be sublime, yet time and again I dread the horizon that will devour me. Consequently, in my need for continuity, I willfully immerse myself in everyday, man-made things. Didn’t I just see a beech copse reflected in the gray-blue of the asphalt? Doesn’t the roar of the evening plane occasionally make a day start over? Isn’t the tin star on the child’s sweater a time-honored tradition? And don’t the plastic bags from which the newspapers have finally been removed flutter in the sun like light-colored pleated skirts? Yes, but that isn’t everyday life. It can be said that everyday life has become evil. Nothing is left but a sad, episodic beauty surrounding man-made things, and that is unreal because there is no certainty of its recurrence. (True, once after leaving Aix I saw a shimmer of Mont Sainte-Victoire clay in the red plastic floor of the Marseilles airport …) Happy the man whom a pair of eyes awaits at home!
Here in Austria I once heard two village elders say: “If they have no faith in anything—then what are they here for?” They were not referring to me, yet I felt concerned. For I had long been troubled by the thought that “it takes faith to keep things for any length of time.” What was this secret of faith that the village elders seemed to know? I could never have described myself as a believer, in childhood still less than now; but didn’t I, very early in my life, have a “picture of pictures”?
I’m going to describe it, because this is the place for it.
This picture was an object in a receptacle in a large room. The room was the parish church, the object was the chalice with the white wafers, the receptacle was a gilded tabernacle, which opened and closed like a revolving door and was kept in a recess in the altar. This so-called holy of holies was for me the reality of realities.